Tag Archives: skill

Well, it ain’t really a Tale for Tuesday, but it is a tale about how you should tell what you can’t really tell when you try. Not in words, anyway…

ON POETRY

Poetry involves the minute manipulation of words in such a way that they are constantly and subtly altered in definition, either so that they take on a broader and more flexible implication than they have ever possessed before, or so that they take on a more narrow and peculiar resolution in terminology than they have ever before possessed.

Do this wisely and well and with patient and practiced craft and you will be considered a master of phrasing and sound, perhaps even possessed of real poetic genius. Do this sloppily or shoddily and in haste and without regard for the demands of true meaning in language and you will be considered a mere dilettante or perhaps even a hapless hack.

I used to practice all the time before I learned to do it
Then I practiced even more to help myself accrue it
I wrote and wrestled, scribed and scored
A thousand lines a day,
I exercised with great accord
If even I do say,
By practice trained I forged my mind
Repetition’s Child,
Drill and Duty, Craftsman’s Kiln
A Master will beguile;
The modern man thinks everything
Is only thin technique, but
Training born and bred in blood
Into the Real Man seeps
If you would be the Great Maestro
Then you must toil long
The road is hard, the trail discards
Those who don’t belong;
And who does not, you might ask
Not deserve to be
The Master of his Better Craft,
The Lord of High Degree?
You need not track with Spying Glass
A Looking Glass will do,
That man who will not sharpen skills
Will soon be bid “adieu.”

German brain researchers studied the brain activity of people who were actively writing, and they discovered one thing that every person should do to become a better writer. Ellen Hendriksen, the Savvy Psychologist, explains how the study worked and reveals the secret.

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Ellen Hendriksen is the host of the Savvy Psychologist podcast, and she recently sent me an article about researchers in Germany who studied people’s brains while they were actively writing. They looked at both professional writers and novices, and they found differences. The professional writers showed brain activity similar to what researchers see in people who are good at music and sports.

Mignon: Before we get into the findings, they used something called an fMRI scanner. What does that actually measure?

Ellen: This is a great question—there are so many fMRI studies in the news these days, but much like “gluten” or “Obamacare,” most of us don’t know what fMRI really is, even though the term gets thrown around a lot. So this is a perfect opportunity for a quick primer!

fMRI stands for functional magnetic resonance imaging. When an area of the brain is used to think thoughts or perform a task, it requires more oxygen, so blood flow to that area increases to meet the demand.

The fMRI scanner uses a strong magnetic field combined with radio waves to create images of this contrast in blood flow—the oxygen-enhanced blood in the active part of the brain reacts differently to the magnetic field and therefore stands out against the less oxygenated blood in the quieter parts of the brain.

The images allow neuroscientists to pinpoint what parts of the brain are in use during a given task, plus there’s no exposure to radiation like in an X-ray or CT scan.

Mignon: What did you think was most interesting about this study? Is it ground-breaking or does it build on things researchers already knew?

Ellen: I’d say both. It is groundbreaking because this is the first time neuroscientists have looked at the brains of experienced writers writing fiction in real time. Two previous studies have had participants make up stories in their heads while in the scanner, but this is the first time we’ve been able to catch the brain in the act of writing.

What’s the useful takeaway message for writers? Practice.

Logistically, this was hard to pull off. You can’t have a computer in the same room as the scanner because of the magnetic field, so the researchers asked writers to write longhand. But, you have to lie down in the scanner, so they couldn’t have the writers sit normally to write. Finally, you have to be absolutely still in the scanner—just like with a regular camera. If your subject moves, you end up with a blurry picture. So the researchers had the triple whammy of figuring out how to get people to lie down with their heads perfectly still, but still write longhand. So through a set of double mirrors and a custom-built writing desk, they jury-rigged a system. You’ll find a picture on the QDT website.

This study was also important because the next frontier of creativity research is identifying neural mechanisms—in other words, this is the first study to nail down how the semi-mystical qualities of creativity and expertise in professional writers manifest as neurons and blood flow. It’s a little bit like pulling back the curtain on the wizard to reveal his gears and levers.

It’s also important to say that creativity and expertise are very difficult to study. There’s so much that goes into it: originality, intelligence, talent, practice effects, motivation, culture. So while this study is a nice shovelful towards the excavation of creativity, there’s a lot more to uncover before we can get a definite picture of what we’re even unearthing.

Ask seasoned writers to come up with an ending to an unfinished short story, and their brains seem to switch into a sort of automatic story-sculpting mode, which may leave them leftover brainpower to focus on the story’s emotion. That’s one of the findings from a new study published in NeuroImage comparing brain scans of expert and beginner fiction writers.

Researchers gave 20 expert writers (who had at least a decade of experience and wrote about 21 hours a week) and 28 newbies (who wrote less than an hour a week) the first part of a story, and asked them first to brainstorm the ending, and then to spend just two minutes writing the rest of the story. All the while, they were lying in a brain scanner. Here’s a neatly summarized take on what the scans showed, from the British Psychological Society’s Research Digest:

In the frontal cortex, expert brains showed greater activity in areas crucial to language and goal selection, including across the inferior frontal gyri (IFG). Verbal creativity has been associated with left IFG activation many times before, but involvement of the right IFG was unexpected. The area is associated with emotional language processing, such as interpreting expressive gestures, so this may suggest that experts are attending more deeply to the emotional currents of text and their ideas.

Expert writing also involved more activation in the left caudate. This is part of the basal ganglia, long known to be critical to learning and expert performance, and seems to reflect ordinarily cortical cognitive processes becoming automatised and bundled together within the deeper brain.

During the brainstorming phase, the expert writers’ brains became active in the area associated with speech processing, suggesting that, for experienced writers, “ideas bubble within them, already on the road from concept to expression, readily communicable, almost rising into their throats” as Alex Fradera on the Research Digest blog phrased it.

We’ll leave you with a line from one of the expert writers’ completed stories. When asked to finish the tale of a bachelor who killed himself in a laundromat, the writer concluded the piece with the phrase, “Unmade laundry, unloved days.” Not bad, considering this person wrote it in two minutes while lying in a brain scanner…